An increasing number of different connectivity types, tunneling mechanisms, and encapsulating protocols may be used to enable communications between a client system and a host system. To enable use of these various methods and protocols, special adapters are generally developed and installed for each different operating system and each encapsulation technology used by a client system. As the number of operating systems are numerous and encapsulation technologies are frequently changing, it becomes increasingly burdensome and inefficient to develop special adapters for each different type of operating system and encapsulation technology in order to take advantage of newly developed connectivity types, tunneling mechanisms, and encapsulating protocols used to communicate with host systems.